Firefox spell check -- How to default to English (United States)?

August 6, 2012 1:01 PM

Why is the spell checker in Firefox defaulting to Dutch, and how can I make it stop?

For the past few weeks, every time I open Firefox, the spell checker defaults to Dutch, so I have to change the language to English (United States), the language which I use by far the most often. This is happening on both my home PC and my laptop, which have more or less identical Firefox set-ups (my PC is Win 7 64-bit and my laptop is Win 7 32-bit).

I have the en-US version of Firefox with Dutch and French dictionaries added on, so the right-click (context) menu for "Languages" in Firefox looks like this:

Dutch
fr-xx-classique+reform1990
English (United States)

under "about:config" the "spellchecker.dictionary" value is set to "en-US".

I am using Firefox 14.0.1. I have the following extensions installed:

- Adblock Plus 2.0.3
- CheckBoxMate Lefedor Edition 0.47
- Context Search 0.4.6
- Dictionnaire français «Classique & Réforme 1990» 4.3
- Download YouTube Videos as MP4 and FLV 1.4.3
- DownThemAll! 2.0.13
- Extension List Dumper 1.15.2
- Ghostery 2.7.2
- Google Search by Image 0.1
- HTTPS-Everywhere 2.1
- IE Tab 2 (FF 3.6+) 4.1.3.1
- Multiple Tab Handler 0.7.2012020901
- Old Default Image Style 2.1
- OptimizeGoogle 0.79.1
- Stop Autoplay 1.2.1
- TubeStop 4
- Woordenboek Nederlands 3.1.0
- Zotero 3.0.7

Thanks!

posted by dhens to computers & internet (4 answers total)

Could be a recurrence of this bug.
posted by unliteral at 8:43 PM on August 9, 2012 [1 favorite]

It looks exactly like the bug unilateral posted. I still have not received a resolution on this. Thanks.
posted by dhens at 4:11 PM on September 24, 2012

Update:

After some poking around, I was able to find a workaround (thought not, perhaps, a permanent fix):

My Dutch and French spellcheckers were installed as extensions. I found where they were hiding their dictionaries, like so:

C:\Users\MyComputerName\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\5c5153y1.default\extensions\[e-mail]\dictionaries\nl.dic
and
C:\Users\MyComputerName\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\5c5153y1.default\extensions\[e-mail]\dictionaries\nl.aff

I copied the ".dic" and ".aff" files to

C:\Program Files (x86)\Mozilla Firefox\dictionaries

and then uninstalled the extensions. Now I have the dictionaries in the context menu, and "English (United States)" is the default.
posted by dhens at 6:17 PM on September 24, 2012

Scratch that, it's not working again...
posted by dhens at 6:26 PM on September 24, 2012